YouTube Video Awards — YouTube will announce on Monday the launch of "YouTube Video Awards" - a late attempt to honor the best-user generated videos of 2006. The seven categories are Most Inspirational, Most Creative, Best Series, Best Comedy, Musician of the Year, Best Commentary and "Most Adorable Video Ever."

YouTube copies Vloggies — Ahh, YouTube is coming late to the video awards show game. Mashable is saying that tomorrow YouTube will announce its own online video contest. Destined to be very popular, I'm sure. — Glad to see we're six months ahead of YouTube (not that it'll matter much …

And the YouTube award goes to... NEW YORK (AP) — Lonelygirl15, OK Go and other YouTube sensations will get an opportunity to walk down a virtual red carpet. — The video-sharing Web site announced Monday that it will hold the first YouTube Video Awards to recognize the best-user created videos of 2006.

Adobe offers early peek at Apollo — Adobe Systems on Monday is expected to release an early version of Apollo, software that will let people run Web applications online and offline. — The first release is an "alpha" version, with a beta due sometime this summer. Version 1.0 is planned for the second half of this year.

The Twitterfication of the blogosphere — Twitter is getting lots of air-time right now. It was heavily discussed and used as the backchannel during SxSW. Some people like Kathy Sierra are questioning if it is TOO good whilst others are predicting the demise of Twitter in 2007.

Researchers Track Down a Plague of Fake Web Pages — Tens of thousands of junk Web pages, created only to lure search-engine users to advertisements, are proliferating like billboards strung along freeways. Now Microsoft researchers say they have traced the companies and techniques behind them.

Fujitsu adopts flash memory for new tablets — Tablet PCs probably get dropped more than other computers, so Fujitsu has created two machines that store data by using flash memory rather than traditional hard drives. — The LifeBook P1610 and LifeBookB6210 are now available with either 16GB or 32GB flash drives.

JUSTIN.TV GOES LIVE — Justin.tv— the live helmet-video blogging site we wrote about last month—went live this morning. The site combines a live video feed, public chat room, and head blogger Justin Kan's daily schedule—which loosely resembles a content programming guide.

Stolen Identities Sold Cheap on the Black Market — Recovering from identity theft can take years and cost thousands of dollars. But how much is your identity worth to the thieves who sell it to other fraudsters? Turns out, less than the price of two tickets to the movies.

Lycos, Early Search Engine, in a U.S. Remake as Jubii — Through a quirk of dot-com history, Lycos Europe cannot sell itself in the United States using its own once-famous name. Instead, the Internet service, partly owned by Bertelsmann of Germany and Telefónica of Spain …

Study: Racing Games Cause Real Car Crashes — If you've been obsessed with PGR or Gran Tourismo lately, German psychologists think you should be extra cautious next time you get behind a real-life wheel. — They say that people who play car-racing games drive more aggressively …

BALLMER ON GOOGLE - UH OH — Late last week Steve Ballmer gave an speech at Stanford in which he stated that Google is a "one trick pony" - that trick being search, of course. He also noted that Google's staff growth is "insane" and called Google, in short, "cute." — Lordy, Steve.

Is VoIP an Excuse for Bad Voice Quality? — In a few hours, the annual Spring VON is going to kick off in San Jose, California. Hundreds of companies, big and small will hawk their wares, pundits will pontificate and a lot of people will talk about convergence.

YouTube Case Study: Widget marketing comes of age — This week's case study was co-authored by guest writers Deepak Thomas and Vineet Buch. — Deepak is an MBA student at the University of Chicago. He previously worked at Oracle for 10 years in engineering and product management roles.